The Life and Times of Jeff Squyres

May 2004 Archives

May 3, 2004

Yeah, but his mom's really *hot*

Turns out that I will be Notre Dame’s 15th quadruple Domer — meaning that I will be the 15th person in history to earn four degrees from Notre Dame.

BA, English, 1994

BS, Computer Engineering, 1994

MS, Computer Science and Engineering, 1996

Ph.D., Computer Science and Engineering, 2004
So I got a bit interrupted in the middle there — avid readers will realize that I lost about 3 years to the military. Ah well. It’s the journey that counts, right?

My Harmony remote has been working great, but has always had one thing that bothered me (read: didn’t work right). When setting up your audio tuner, you have to select between whether you go to different audio inputs by pushing one button and cycling through the inputs or whether you have a different button for each input. I actually have a combination of both — I have multiple buttons, but some of them toggle between two inputs (e.g., Video 1 and 5.1 channel). The end result is that the Harmony would do the Wrong Thing sometimes because it didn’t realize that it was causing a toggle. I’ve been meaning to e-mail tech support about this for weeks, and finally got around to sending a detailed bug report last night. They mailed me back today and said, “Sure, no problem. This happens to a lot of people. Tell us the details of what you need, and we can do it for you.” ROCK ON! How cool is that? When, exactly, is the last time you heard that from a tech support department?

Our next-generation MPI now has a name (after long, arduous, excruciating debate): Open MPI.

May 4, 2004

Schooner Tuna: the tuna with a heart!

UPDATE OCT 2008: If you landed here via a google search for “Schooner Tuna”, welcome! I’m shocked and amazed how many people land on this page while specifically searching for our patriotic friends at Schooner Tuna. Here’s the only reasonable Schooner Tuna reference that I can find (although I didn’t look too hard…):

They're crap. Crap... crap... megga-crap

Ok, I’m really annoyed. I left out a significant entry in JJC, and when someone asked me about it the other day, I was insistent that it was here. Turns out, it wasn’t. Doh! I actually know what happened, too — I had a journal entry all typed up (including this now-missing entry) and my browser crashed. So I had to type it up again. But I apparently forgot one part of the entry.

Doh. :-(

So here you go…

Tracy and I went to California to D&D’s wedding (Darrell and Diann, you dork — +2 swords against chaotic evil trolls were not involved). It was awesome. We were in wine country, and got a meet a bunch of Diann’s family, got to see some friends that I hadn’t seen since I lived in LA for a summer, and even saw Darrell’s younger brother and his fiance. The whole weekend was great; lotsa laughs and good times. And oh yeah, Darrell and Diann got married. :-)

Their honeymoon was a 2 week cruise to Hawaii and back. It had its ups and downs, but apparently they both had a good time.

Tracy and I were extremely pleased to have been invited; it was a very small wedding (2 dozen people, tops?), and I was the best man. So I had to give a toast, which I kinda screwed up the delivery on, but I think it went ok.

Anyway, the weekend rocked. For everyone else who missed it, sucks to be you.

In the previous journal entry, I couldn’t get MT Textile’sPRE HTML handling. I had to escape out of Textile and do the HTML myself. Bonk.

The last 3 weeks have been spent writing papers and proposals. Not fun stuff at all. Quite stressful and did I mention that it wasn’t fun? A few more papers due in the immediate future, but then hopefully no more writing for quite a while…

Brian’s heading back to Bloomies soon. I believe this to be a fundamentally good thing. He’ll be back to developing LAM/MPI and Open MPI full time. We’ve got to get LAM/MPI 7.1 out the door. Soon!

It’s still keeping time perfectly, but it chimes things incorrectly. For example, the clock is supposed to chime music on the hour and 1, 2, or 3 bongs at 15, 20, and 45 minutes past the hour. The bongs come at the wrong times — 2 bongs at 45 minutes past the hour, or 3 bongs on the hour. The only thing that is consistent is that the music — when it plays — it only played on the hour.

The clock is an amazingly complex machine. I’m guessing that there’s a mechanism that only allows music to play on the hour. But the bongs have some kind of mechanism that is supposed to go every 3 out of every 4 15 minute intervals, and it further indicates how many bongs to chime. I think this mechanism is dirty and is not always advancing like it should — leading it to sometimes skip an interval, and therefore get out of sync.

I’m probably going to have to take this thing in to get repaired — there’s no way that I’m going to attempt to repair such an intracate, delicate piece of machinery myself!

May 15, 2004

Happiness is the Dome in the rear view mirror

Well, it finally happened, and I have a [pixelated] video clip, some pictures, and [another] diploma to prove it.

I’ve graduated from Notre Dame for the 4th time and have become Notre Dame’s 15th quadruple Domer. Tracy and I went up to ND for the graduation weekend and met my parents there. I ended up having lunch with Maddog and Brandon M. right before the ceremony (Tracy and the AP’s went to the President’s Luncheon, which I couldn’t attend because I had to line up before that lunch was over). The movie clip is a bit rough, but you can see me going across the stage (and Ed right behind me!). There’s also a bunch of pictures from campus in my doctoral garb.

So it’s finally official — I’m now Dr. Squyres.

I think my friends are allowed to call me that once, and that’ll be enough. ;-)

(the title of this entry is something that a Domer friend of mine told me, long long ago)

May 22, 2004

So this is where you sneaks go to try out your interpretive dance

It seems that mowing my lawn and driving back from Bloomington are both very good times for me to do heavy-duty thinking. I’ve mentioned the driving thing in previous entries, but I never really recognized the mowing-the-lawn thing until today.

As most people do, I hate mowing my lawn. It’s annoying. It’s time consuming. It’s sweaty work (particularly in Louisville). I don’t have a huge lot — indeed, it’s actually pretty small. But it still takes 30-45 minutes to mow the lawn. I ususally start in the front and work my way around the house to the back. The lawn is slightly larger in the back than the front, so I spent a bit more time back there.

I’ve noticed that I tend to have all my best ideas while mowing the back lawn. I guess it takes about 15-20 minutes to be lulled into a state where I can do real free-associative thinking. By then, it’s usually a race to finish mowing the lawn so that I can come inside and record my ideas before they disappear (yes, I have the short-term memory of a gnat with ADD).

The same thing happens while on long-distance driving — particularly on the long, straight, boring highways here in the US midwest. So it typically happens on the latter half of my drive home from Bloomington — when I’m on I-65 heading south through Indiana. I-64 east across Louisville is typically a bit too hectic and I need to pay attention to my driving.

Mmm… free associative thinking… That’s where great ideas like chocolate beer and donut alarms came from!

Spent a week at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville) last week working on Open MPI with the other developers. Good stuff. It’s coming along well.

We got a parking ticket one day, though — doh! We’ll see if UT is aggressive enough to pursue me through the rental car agency.

On the upside, though, I pre-paid for the gas in my rental car. Seconds after driving into the rental car return lot at the Louisville airport, the low fuel light went on. Woo hoo! Maximum value. :-)

May 31, 2004

You don't need to be thinking immortablity, you need to be thinking "hit it with the 7 iron."

Tracy and I just returned from a week-long vacation in the Bahamas (at the Atlantis resort); it was very relaxing. Atlantis has an amazingly massive oceanic habitat for thousands of fish, sharks, rays, and other kinds of sea creatures. It’s all maintained so that you can walk by, through, and under the water and see all the animals. Not only a massive feat of engineering (the entire system of habitats cycles water through to the ocean 5 times a day), it’s also really friggen’ cool.

Despite the fact that the hotel had several WiFi hotspots (including all the pools), I resisted the urge to check my e-mail for the entire week. ☺

There was lots of sun, food, beach, sun, pool, reggae music, and… did I mention sun? I think I read 4.5 books by the side of the pools. Awesome; I love reading.

Tracy and I were very glad to go and essentially be “totally away” for just about an entire week. It’s basically the calm before the storm when the twins will be born in a few months. ☺

We came home from all the sun to massive storms in Kentucky. Yesterday evening, there were enromous storms with lots of tornado activity. Most of the bad stuff went just north and just south of us (by only a few miles), but Tracy and I were down in the basement for portions of the evening — glued to streaming video on my laptop (!) from the local weather station, watching doppler radar maps and watching reports and the impending weather as it marched across Indiana and Kentucky.

I learned some new words and phrases: “tornadic activity” and “cyclonic activity.”

It’s amazing, actually — this technology simply wasn’t around a few years ago. And because of this kind of technology (for example, the weather stations are able to identify and graphically depict “cyclonic activity” just about exactly when it happens in a fully rotatable 3D depiction, as well as use those models for accurate predictions on direction, distance, and time to when a specific area will be hit), very few lives were lost. There was lots and lots of damage, but people were able to be warned to either leave or seek shelter. And, everyone knew exactly when the bad weather was over

That’s a good use of technology.

Open MPI is humming along. Lots of good stuff happening that I can’t quite mention here yet (gotta get the papers published, first!). Our next meeting is in a week.